Best SEO Plugins Used By Bloggers

Written by: Jason Bayless | September 23, 2015

The WordPress platform comes with thousands of different plugins, so it’s confusing for new bloggers which plugins they should install. If you have little to no knowledge of SEO, then it’s necessary for you to install a few SEO plugins to ensure your website is seen in the best light possible by Google. Here is a list of the best SEO plugins used by bloggers to get you started on the right foot:

#1 All-In-One SEO Pack

As it’s name suggests, the All-In-One Seo Pack provides an abundance of SEO optimization features for your site. This plug-in provides easy-to-fill-out fields for your meta description, meta keywords, and meta title. This is more convenient than editing the code.

A viable way to monitor the links on your website is LinkPatrol. Link maintenance is a necessary task for your blog because users don’t like to click on broken or spammy links. Having a broken link could also hurt your search engine ranking.

When you use LinkPatrol to scan the links on your site, you can easily fix them by checking the box “strip” (deletes the link) or “nofollow” to edit the code. This saves you time because you don’t have to edit the specific post to delete or nofollow the link.

If you make a mistake while using this plugin, you have the option of undoing the previous change.

#3 SEO Friendly Images

This WordPress plugin automatically attaches alt tags and title attributes to your images. Optimizing your alt tags and image titles is an on-page SEO technique that helps drive additional traffic to your website by giving you a boost in image search.

#4 Google XML Sitemaps

An important feature to have for faster rankings in Google is a sitemap because search engines can easily look at the structure of your website from the sitemap. This plug-in notifies search engines each time you publish a new post as well.

#5 Nginx Helper

Website speed is increasingly important as web users expect their Internet to work more quickly and Google desires to meet their search needs. They want answers to their questions as fast as possible. Therefore, a page that loads half as quickly as yours is sometimes given a little more importance in the SERPs.

Nginx Helper hastens the load time of your website by temporarily storing static resources (e.g. images and CSS and Javascript files) in a cache. In addition, this WordPress plugin serves PHP files more swiftly than LAMP servers using Apache.

Other major benefits of Nginx helper are the ability to purge your server cache (option will appear on your WordPress dashboard) and to customize rule settings on tasks, such as posting a comment or publishing a post.

As a word of caution, don’t download too many plugins because they will slow down your website and almost half of web users expect a website to load within 2 seconds. To check your website speed, you can use this free tool: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

Therefore, you should only use the most essential WordPress plugins for your website. Between 5 and 10 plugins is usually a good number to maintain.

All of the WordPress SEO plugins listed above are worth installing on your site because they provide benefits that optimize your site for search engines, increase the speed at which your new post is crawled by search engines, manage the links on your site to eliminate broken or spammy links that can damage your rankings and conversions, and decrease load speed of your website.